Miles O’Brien is an idiot. He tries, really he does, to be hard-hitting and confrontational with his guests, a la Claire Balderson of the BBC (whom I love and admire). But more often than not, something stupid slips out and destroys his credibility. While interviewing former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge about the big wiretapping ruling yesterday, he actually said (emphasis mine):
And to—the allegation is that [the Bill of Rights] has been ignored here because of the urgencies of war. And while the urgencies of war are wonderful, why are we in this war after all? We’re there to protect the right that we hold so dear, right?
I can’t get over it—I almost fell off the freakin’ treadmill when that one came out. The “urgencies of war are wonderful?” Isn’t that what’s getting Bush into trouble in the first place? What about that urgency of war that made Roosevelt stick thousands of Japanese-Americans in internment camps? Or thousands that are filling up Guantanamo (and emptying at the same time as the prisoner suicide rates continue to increase)? The rebuttal, from Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, whose on-air time was a fraction compared to the ridiculous back-and-forth between O’Brien and Ridge, made the salient point that:
And the reason they did this is because long before 9/11, there were people in this administration that wanted to expand presidential authority. That was before 9/11. And they saw 9/11 as an opportunity to reinvent the presidency. And so they wanted to go it alone because they wanted to increase the power of that office.
That’s right. When it comes down to it, it’s all irrelevant. Because the administration would have figured out a way to do this anyway, 9/11 notwithstanding.
But that’s beside the point, which is: I hate TV news.
